The Toilers of the Sea Read Online Free Page B

marks by which you can distinguish the hurdles on which hobgoblins and auxcriniers 9 ride at night.
    All over the slopes of the ravines are ferns, bindweed, wild roses, red-berried holly, hawthorn, pink thorn, danewort, privet, and the long pleated thongs known as Henry IV’s collarettes. Amid all this vegetation there multiplies and prospers a species of willow herb that produces nuts much favored by donkeys—a preference expressed by the botanists, with great elegance and decency, in the term Onagriaceae. Everywhere there are thickets, arbors, all kinds of wild plants, expanses of green in which a winged world twitters and warbles, closely watched by a creeping world; blackbirds, linnets, robins, jays; the goldfinch of the Ardennes hurries on its way at full speed; flocks of starlings maneuver in spirals; elsewhere are greenfinches, goldfinches, the Picardy jackdaw, the red-footed crow. Here and there a grass snake.
    Little waterfalls, their water carried in channels of worm-eaten wood from which water escapes in drops, drive mills that can be heard turning under the boughs. In some farmyards there can still be seen a cider press and the old circle hollowed out of stone in which the apples were crushed. The cattle drink from troughs like sarcophagi: some Celtic king may have rotted in this granite casket in which the Juno-eyed cow is now drinking. Tree-creepers and wagtails, with friendly familiarity, come down and steal the hens’ grain. Along the shore everything is tawny. The wind wears down the grass that is burned up by the sun. Some of the churches are caparisoned in ivy, which reaches up to the belfry. Here and there in the empty heathland an outcrop of rock is crowned by a cottage. Boats, laid up on the beach for lack of a harbor, are buttressed by large boulders. The sails seen on the horizon are ocher or salmon yellow rather than white. On the side exposed to rain and wind the trees have a fur of lichen; and the very stones seem to take their precautions, covering themselves with a skin of dense and solid moss. There are murmurings, whisperings, the rustling of branches; seabirds fly swiftly past, some of them with a silver fish in their beak; there are an abundance of butterflies, varying in color according to season, and all kinds of tumults deep in the sounding rocks. Grazing horses gallop across the untilled land; they roll on the ground, leap about, stop short, offer their manes to be tossed by the wind and watch the waves as they roll in, one after the other, perpetually.
    In May the old buildings in the countryside and on the coast are covered in wallflowers, and in June in lilacs. In the dunes the old batteries are crumbling. The countryfolk benefit from the disuse of the cannon, and the fishermen’s nets are hung out to dry on the embrasures. Within the four walls of the dismantled blockhouse a wandering donkey or a tethered goat browses on thrift and blue thistles. Half-naked children play, laughing; on the roadways can be seen the patterns they have drawn for their games of hopscotch. In the evening the setting sun, radiantly horizontal, lights up the return of the heifers in the hollow ways as they linger to crop the hedges on either side, causing the dog to bark. The wild capes on the west coast sink down into the sea in an undulating line; on them are a few shivering tamarinds. As twilight falls the cyclopean walls, with the last daylight passing between their stones, form long crests of black lacework along the summit of the hills. The sound of the wind, heard in these solitudes, gives a feeling of extraordinary remoteness.

VIII
    ST. PETER PORT
    St. Peter Port, capital of Guernsey, was originally built of houses of carved wood brought from Saint-Malo. A handsome stone house of the sixteenth century still stands in the Grand’Rue. St. Peter Port is a free port. The town is built on the slopes of a charming huddle of valleys and hills clustered around the Old Harbor as if they had